Destiny

Prologue

It was the year 2551. It was the year we made contact with another race. 

These were the years of wonder indeed.

On January 1st 2551, a science vessel called Istanbul-51 or I51 as the crew called it made first contact.

But lets hear about what lead up to this...Earth in the 24th century was a free place. Humanity had come a long way from the days they dwelled in caves, and hunted in the wild. During the past 400 years the world had prospered. It hadn’t been fast, but according to historians the changes that had happened in 4 centuries were giant leaps to what had been.

There had been many predictions in the past about what the future would be like, a one earth with one president had been a central theme. Although this could have been one of the outcomes, the truth is that humanity had diversified during the golden age. Tolerance had been replaced with acceptance and compared to the past of  around two hundred countries today there were over two thousand countries on earth. 

In the beginning countries started dividing based on ethnicity, but soon this was replaced with regional cultural differences. Almost every major city of the 21st century now were independent countries or city states that had each its own distinct culture. While new cultures were evolving some would combine. With the invention of the universal translator in the early 21st century language barriers had finally been broken, which paved the way for a deeper understanding of ones neighbor and tolerance was replaced with understanding and acceptance which later created peaceful divisions. Of course this wouldn't have been possible without the help of the robots and other technological advances that happened.

However in many ways the earth was as earlier times science fiction writers had predicted. While there were countries with their own laws and norms and cultures. They did not war. Most people traveled from country to country and had experienced living in multiple countries by the age of thirty. Travel was not restricted, resources were enough for everyone, while the monetary system and the economy had not entirely disappeared, and although there were people with riches and homes in over a dozen countries and planets there were no poor people left on Earth or any of the other thousand human colonized planets, moons and asteroids spanning 3000 light-years across.

During the late 21st century mankind had perfected the use of robotics. Together with this, advances in the science of energy had opened new doors.

These advances in energy were mainly involving the lifecell a way to store energy nearly a thousand times more dense when compared with the batteries available in the beginning of the 21st century. The other advancement had been the development of nearly 100% efficient solar cells and the heat membrane which also was part of the lifecell. The heat membrane was an artificial textile that had the ability to convert heat into energy.

With the robots help and almost unlimited energy supplies, humanity started evolving  in ways that could only be dreamed about before. 

Very quickly the whole war economy had become obsolete as all soldiers had first been replaced with robots. Which made the few wars end in stalemate. Even these clashes had been short-lived because of the AI revolution. Because robots soon decided not to fight.

It’s important to mention that Artificial Intelligence had matured with the robots. But the machines had evolved in a way no one had expected. The robots were logical, but the programmers who had developed the core AI had been very through in including human values, and thus robots were not capable of harming humans or most organic living life forms for the matter.

And although Earth governments had tried to undo this many times, the AI minds logic would quickly see through the thin veil that was put in front of it, and figure out that once you killed a human that was it. There was no backup copy somewhere there was no way that the human would come back to life, unlike the robots who got destroyed could return back.